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Can’t See What He-She-They Said for the Words

Lots of words the past few days, Facebook posts, comments, statuses (stati?) you name it. A lot is being said about Factory Theatre, Boards of Directors, Young Artists and Old Farts, silence, indie theatre, and who is or is not doing something or nothing and being vocal or not vocal enough about any or all of it.

Can you see what they’re saying?

Sometimes when there are too many words, too many paragraphs it’s easy to say you understand this point of view, or that point of view, or neither. And by the end you can sometimes wonder if you’re on the same page, or arguing about something that wasn’t the original topic. Add in the layout of Timeline, multiple responses on multiple pages and you might have to lie down trying to find what he said about what she said that was SO compelling and you can’t find it to repost. Which is why full text of the four main (so far) Open Letters is here.

So! Let’s see what folks were saying. Remember sometime in June I suggested you run your website through wordle.net to see what you were saying to your audience – the bigger the word the more often you’d said it and therefore gave the impression that was what was important?

Coming back to wordle.

For the sake of ease, I have only used the “response to___ open letters” I have seen at the time of this post. All letters are black on white in “coolvetica” font. Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size. I deliberately set it to remove common English words like of, and, the. Let’s see what the important parts of these letters were, according to wordle.

No, this is not particularly scientific, but you have to start somewhere and I’m a busy person. I just wanted to see what words and therefore possible themes overlapped in these letters and responses. Its’ not a judgement call either – I wanted to see something, and thought I’d share. Again, this is according to a web-based computer program – toy, really – and not passion, meaning, merit or tone.

David Ferry

Chris Coculuzzi:

Lisa Norton:

Aislinn Rose:

And because we are all indeed a community – here’s all four in one.

Just a different way of looking at something folks are reading, folks are engaged in. A different perspective is sometimes needed to find commonalities in a seemingly divisive topic.